The Deep Sea Drilling Project - 1561 Words

The Deep Sea Drilling Project (also known as DSDP) was the first of three international scientific ocean drilling programs that have operated for forty or more years that was designed to investigate the evolution of ocean basins by core drilling ocean sediments and the underlying oceanic crust. On June 24th, 1966, a Prime Contract was signed between the National Science Foundation (also known as NSF) and The Regents at The University of California was signed, this contract was the first phase in the Deep Sea Drilling Project. The project was based from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California and Global Marine, Inc. conducted the drilling operations. The D/V Glomar Challenger was the ship that the drill†¦show more content†¦In Phase II of the Deep Sea Drilling Project the D/V Glomar Challenger drilled and cored in the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Red Sea. Phase II lasted around 30 months an d ended on August 11th, 1972 and by that time the project had been incredibly successful, on the second drill sight they drilled down 3500 feet and discovered salt domes. Today, the potential of oil being underneath these salt domes is an important avenue for commercial development, but commercial development and finding oil wasn’t what was important for the Deep Sea Drilling Project or any of it’s crew members. The crew member were all about scientific discovery and discovering the unknown or extrapolating on what already exists. Eventually the crew and the Deep Sea Drilling Project found what they were looking for. They drilled 17 holes at 10 different sites along the oceanic ridge between South America and Africa. The recorded samples had definitive proof for continental drift and seafloor renewal at rift zones. Continental Drift was a theory created by a German scientist named Alfred Wegener and basically what the theory means is that the Earth’s continents (North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Antarctica, Africa, and Australia) were not all where they are now on the map and will not